Gaps, Resources, and Potentials for Growth in Comparative Engineering Education Research

Comparative education studies educational phenomena in more than one country and uses the country as the unit for comparison. Comparative research not only generates knowledge about education abroad but also brings forward new insights into education systems in the researchers’ home countries. This chapter provides a brief overview of the evolution of comparative education and outlines its three main approaches – scientific, ameliorative, and interpretive – for comparing education systems across countries. The chapter then surveys the extent to which recent publications of engineering education research (EER) in three world languages (English, Chinese, and Spanish) have utilized a comparative approach and presents exemplar EER studies that illustrate each one of the three main approaches of comparative education. Based on an assessment of the strengths and limitations of comparative approaches for EER, the chapter lays out potential contributions of comparative engineering education research and calls upon engineering education researchers to embrace comparative perspectives and approaches.